


welcome to the new age (it's a revolution, i suppose)

by seasofgreen



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: 1970s, Ensemble Cast, F/M, Families of Choice, M/M, Mentions of PTSD, Not A Fix-It, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Past Character Death, Post-Movie(s), Telepathy, multiple POVs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-02
Updated: 2014-06-14
Packaged: 2018-02-03 02:22:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1727585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seasofgreen/pseuds/seasofgreen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is just another game of chess, Erik thinks. A much longer one, one where the pieces are laid out for the taking.</p>
<p>In which the X-Men and the Brotherhood are formed, old grudges are tested, and a new threat starts to build. (Post DoFP, pre Apocalypse). </p>
<p>!!Computer crashed and story was lost; will update eventually.!!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This is me playing with movie/616/ultimates/cartoon canon after walking out of DoFP like "I NEED TO KNOW MORE!"
> 
> in this chapter I'm working the "Magneto Is a Ridiculously Dramatic Asshole" angle (my personal favorite) and the assumption that he played the White House stuff in order to turn out in his favor. 
> 
> thanks to [van](http://gummyseacreatures.tumblr.com) for bein' my beta. c: 
> 
> there's a warning for physical assault in this chapter, but the female character in question is not harmed.

 

It's almost silly how easy it is to evade the humans, Erik thinks. Outside of the White House, the now Memorial-Stadium-supposedly-secret-bunker crash zone, it's easy to hide in the frenzied streets. He's had a lot of practice at it, and even after ten years imprisoned it's easy to fall back into the carefully untraceable steps he's walked for most of his life. He'd managed to get out of the center of the city fine, but manipulating the magnetic fields now is too much of a risk, when the government and the military have gone into crisis mode and there's helicopters and air support hovering over DC. He could take them out, but Mystique's gunshot had left him slightly disoriented.   

 And there's work he needs to do. 

There is, in fact, a lot of work of to do now. He'd set himself in place with his performance in front of the television cameras, all shock and awe and a flare of dramatics. Enough to send a message to the government and enough to direct the attention of his fellow mutants back onto him. Now, there is another Brotherhood to build that is completely his, not taken from Shaw's old Hellfire Club, and new mutants to recruit - alone again, this time. Alone, even though Charles had let him go instead of turning him over to the human authorities. He'd gotten inside of Erik's head again, after getting in his face on the plane and snarling that he wouldn't ever. He'd stayed in Erik's mind just long enough to rip the twisted metal of the stadium lights off himself, flicking the switches of power, mutation, and the ever present hum of magnetism in his brain but touching nothing else, not even ghosting over the slightest memories or surface emotions. Erik didn't know if the avoidance was because Charles already knew what lie in Erik's head or because he was too afraid to find out. The why didn't matter, as the second the warped steel and glass had come off him, Charles had let him go. That action alone was more telling than anything. 

 It was a goodbye, but it wasn't a permanent one. 

Charles had acted, instead of sitting in his big house. This is just another game of chess, Erik thinks. A much longer one, one where the pieces are laid out for the taking.

 Hopefully, he muses, Charles managed to get himself out of there without having to make small talk with the man who wanted to annihilate them all. 

Night is beginning to fall over Washington, and despite the hours that have passed, there's still a little blood seeping out of the wound on his neck. It's nothing that requires immediate attention, but it's enough to make his steps more deliberate with each passing minute. He rolls his shoulders, feeling the uncomfortable but not unknown feeling of blood drying in his clothes. A police car wizzes by, flying through a stop light on the way to the White House, and Erik speeds it up further so it slides past him without noticing his presence. It probably wouldn't have, either way.  

People are bustling, trying to get off the streets, as rumors and whispers spread about what happened on the White House lawn. He sticks to side streets, weaving in and out of tiny alleys, the kind packed with fire escapes and junker cars, where despite the brick walls there is enough metal that he knows he holds the upper hand. There aren't very many plastic guns in the world, but Erik is cautious. He needs to be, again, after Paris and the showing in DC. He can't afford even the smallest miscalculation anymore, even though Mystique's shot had missed on purpose. Much like his, he thinks with a quirk of his lips. She knew how to shoot, as he’d been the one to teach her, but the plastic bullet's holes in his neck aren't something he'd like to have again. He needs to find somewhere to set up a base, a new hideout - not one of the one's the fragments of Shaw's group had been hiding in.  

Another three police cars fly past, their back wheels hovering off the ground and their garbled, off pitch sirens fading into the distance. He rounds two more corners, the bustle of the city starting to fade. The further he gets from the area around the national mall, the quieter it becomes. Eventually as the sun is beginning to fully set, there is silence, as people are probably in up in their apartments, most likely glued to their televisions. 

The silence is broken by the piercing sound of a scream. It's close - bloodcurdling, oh, how he's used to bloodcurdling - and not more than a couple of blocks away. 

There's the telltale sounds of a struggle beginning as he closes in on the sound of the screaming, and Erik's eyes narrow, fingers curling where they lay at his side to unconsciously twist the shards of metal from the wiring of the Sentinels that still sit inside one of his pockets.  

"Leave me alone!" someone shouts, high and feminine with panic and fear in their voice, and the heavy sound of boots on concrete follows her struggle as her voice tapers off into a sob. A moment later, there's a sharp sound, like a bang, that reverberates off the metal he can feel around the scuffle, making the ground shake. A large section of gutter on the side of the adjacent apartment building warps itself, tearing itself off the brick and hitting the ground with an ear-shattering sound, old rainwater splattering everywhere and soaking the street as far away as where Erik is pressed against the wall, listening to the fight of one of his own.

"She's a witch!" a different voice yells, and there's a dissonance to it like the speaker is being yanked in a different direction. The girl is fighting back, and they're terrified. 

As they should be. Erik already knows that the alley they're in is a dead end. 

As he rounds the corner, his hands are already up and magnetic fields are humming around him, loud in his ears. There are three boys standing to block off the street, the kind of boys that would have been men, but their twisted expressions and their all too familiar brand of sneers - the kind that reek of mistreatment and disgust - tell him otherwise. One is glancing around nervously, hackles obviously raised, and the other two are mumbling to each other, heads turned to watch the struggle behind them. 

The girl who had screamed is further back in the alleyway with the last of the thugs, who has an impressive bruise blooming across his face, holding her by the front of her long dress. It's already torn, one scarlet shoulder hanging loose. One of her boots is ripped into shreds, pieces of suede strewn everywhere alongside red polyester. She struggles against the thug's grip, and he changes his hold so that her neck tilts dangerously backwards in his grasp. She yelps and struggles, and reaches out behind her to where a dumpster sits in the corner of the alley. She's too far away to touch it, but her fingers clench and unclench in quick patterns, like she's playing a song only she knows. Her eyes shine in the light cast from the apartment windows above them. 

 

The dumpster catches fire. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't take long for Alex to find his way back to the Xavier mansion. After watching half the shit that went down in Paris, _the fuckin' idiots,_ he'd repeated in his head over and over, that _son of a bitch_ \- he'd checked out of his shitty motel room and booked it to Westchester. The red blasts of anger he'd always felt were easier to control now, humming under his skin in the way he'd been forced to hide it during the war. Hadn't hid it for long enough, Alex thinks, as he remembers when he finally let it go in the damp jungle to save another private, the fear in the eyes of his CO, the sedative the medic had tried to pump into his veins, and the military contractor that Raven had saved them all from. 

The bus driver (All the way to New York it would take him, straight, no other stops) is listening to the news. It was several hours old by now, but still new enough to still make an entire nation sit and listen - the White House destroyed, sentinel attack, a man who could move metal, a blue girl, and a beast. _We now know some of them are good_ , one commentator remarked, while another spat,  _what does that matter when everyone was almost killed? These so-called mutants - they seemed to all know each other, didn't they?_ The driver doesn't seem to be listening much to the arguing pundits, though, and Alex takes a deep breath to steady himself, power humming thick under his skin. It's time to stop running. 

Most of the other passengers on the bus are asleep, but Daniels, one of the other soldiers, and more importantly, one of the other mutants Raven had rescued, is awake next to him. He had insisted on tagging along with him upon their return to the States, and he’d jammed a wide brimmed hat on his head to cover his noticeable spikes. His mutation hadn't manifested until they were on the losing side of a firefight, and Daniels still has no idea how to pull them back in.  

 Alex knows someone who might, though.

The last time he'd seen the mansion, he'd been leaving because of the draft, bitter and angry from the state of the world and the loss of his freedom again, and still raw from what had happened in those few months when there had been something other than sadness in the mansion. Though, Alex reasoned, there had always been a bittersweet angle to their makeshift family - a hole left by a man that had turned to rock and then into nothing. 

The Prof had managed to fix some of that, taken the pieces that were left of them after Cuba and made something good out of it for a little while - though Darwin was gone, and Erik, Raven, and Angel were gone too. Gone in a different way, gone with nothing left to show for it except for Charles' wheelchair and his inability to trust wholeheartedly like he used to. Despite that, Hank and Alex had tried to convince him to switch his silver steel chair to a plastic one, one made of some kind of polymer, anything that wasn't metal. Charles had refused. 

In the time Alex has been gone, he wonders if Charles had ever been convinced. 

If the Prof hasn't, he better be now. 

He remembers the weak, watery smile Charles had given him the day he'd left for basic training and how not-teacher-like he'd seemed. They'd lost half of their already small staff and student numbers that day, numbers that had already dwindled thanks to Erik's arrest and subsequent trial. It had been a real shit-show back then, being that it made the only real public representation of mutant-kind a prolific murderer and assassin. 

It was exactly the sort of thing parents didn't like, and most of the students at the school had the kinds of parents who didn't trust their _own_ children with their abilities, let alone the actions of adults with mutations. Charles had even missed some of the student's departures that year, as he'd gone to DC to sit in the media circus that was the trial with Hank. Charles had refused to testify, though he _was_ asked by the CIA, and they had every reason to be mistrustful of the CIA. Alex had stayed behind, because the betrayal on the beach was already enough to make his skin burn hot to the point of seeping through. Part of him wishes he had gone, because Charles had come back a different man.

And then the war had happened, and the rest of the students had left, one by one. 

In the end, the Professor really was one of them - not any more suited to lead than the students themselves were to be G-Men. X-Men, really, as they'd jokingly started calling themselves that after the day Charles had to send Moira away.  

The bus drops them at a station in New York City, and they get in the first cab they can find that will take them as far as Westchester county. Daniels pays up front, and Alex knows better than to question where he got the money for a four-hour ride. He'd thrown some more cash on top so the driver doesn't talk, so he can take the hat off his head once he slides into the back of the taxi. He scratches at the black spines before resting his arm on the window. They're quiet for a while, the silence of two people who share the same horror stories.  

"So this place we're going to, it's a school?" Daniels  - no, Evan, says - Alex has to remind himself to call the guy by his first name - they're not in Vietnam anymore. 

"It was when I was last there," Alex replies, "Lots of different grades, and…" he picks his words carefully, still wary of the driver, "ability levels." 

"Teachers, too?" 

"Yeah, before...you know." Alex says. He himself didn't teach, but he'd looked after a couple of the more rowdy students, keeping them in line and making sure they didn't hurt each other roughhousing, powers or no powers. The kids always reminded him a bit of Scott - an old wound he hadn't had enough time to nurse before everything had happened. "Bunch of interesting people," he says, as that's the best way to describe a telepath, a nerdy blue beast, and a teenager who's whining could break glass. _Another one who's gone now_ , he thinks. 

They’re far from the city now and the roads are almost empty at this time of the day, dusk settling in, and there's only one other car on the road.

 

It's black. Government tags. 

 

Alex shakes the paranoia out of his head, and leans back on the headrest, closing his eyes.  

Eventually, they get close enough and decide to ditch the cab and walk the rest of the way to the mansion, wanting to lie as low as possible. 

The Xavier house is the same as it always was - old brown facade, large windows, a show of wealth and power. The ivy crawling up the gate is new, the _Xavier's School For Gifted Youngsters_  sign lying in dusty and dirty pieces in the grass, which is now overgrown and shades of brown. The fountain in the circular driveway is filled with months, if not years, of dead leaves. A frog swims to the surface.  

"Did it always look like this?" Evan shifts nervously as Alex pushes the gate open. 

"No. It…" he pauses, "was a lot more majestic looking," he eventually decides on, trudging up the driveway to the front door.  

  _Alex!_ a voice shouts in his head, and he can feel the relief and hope sloppily bleeding into it, more uncontrolled than Alex has ever seen Charles' powers. He can feel his shoulders relax though, and he knows he's not really sending back any words but a jumble of _shockfinallyeasingintorelief, finallyhomethankgod._  

He raises a hand to knock on the door, and it opens before his hand makes contact with the wood. 

"Hey." Alex says, a bit nervously, as he watches the door open. Hank's skinny human form is peering at him through wire-framed glasses a bit uncertainly, but his expression changes and shifts, and Alex is soon covered in six feet of blue fur. 

It takes him a moment, longer than he should, to realize that the big nerd is hugging him.  

"You're back." he says, and it's the same voice Alex remembers from the way he sounded when he did something cool in his lab, something science-y. He sounds happy. 

"Yeah, I'm back." 

Daniels shifts his pack uncertainly on his back, the outsider to the reunion. Hank turns to look at him. 

 "You can take the hat off, you know." Hank says, blue starting to fade back into pale skin. He smiles. 

 

* * *

 

The boys in the alley are no problem to dispose of. The first picks up a piece of gutter from the sidewalk but has flicked from his hands as soon as he touches it, as Erik runs him into the brick wall by the cross around his neck. That makes the rest of them forget about the girl, and the second charges at him. It takes but a twitch of his fingers to undo the man's belt and use it to twist his arms together, slamming him into the ground. The belt digs in hard enough into his skin to draw blood, and Erik can feel the iron in it he bleeds out, satisfyingly, onto the concrete. 

After a stadium, sentinels, a submarine, and a satellite dish, this is nothing. Breathe in, breathe out. 

_Between rage and serenity_ , a soundless voice says in his head. 

The third one, the youngest of the men, rushes at him with nothing but bare fists, and Erik yanks the rest of the gutter system off the brick wall, pausing to smirk before wrapping it twice around the kid's body. His face goes red as he screams in pain, and Erik drops him like he once dropped Russian soldiers wrapped in barb wire. 

The last of them is still holding the girl, and he lets her go with the distain one typically reserves for a sack of potatoes. She lands on her side with a yelp, rising to hold herself up on bruised hands. 

 "Freaks!" he shouts, at both her and Erik, and she winces at the name like she's been called that too many times.  

Erik holds him against the wall by spare change in his pocket. There's a knife, too, in his jacket, a bit too close to the surface - like he was about to reach for it before Erik rounded the corner- and that makes his blood boil. Erik feels for something else, lest the girl become too afraid of him cutting the man's throat on the street, and the zipper on the jacket causes the man's head to connect with the brick, hard, and he slumps to the floor in a heap. It's not worth it to see if he's breathing.  

The girl looks up at him, then, eyes wary and glancing over the - still breathing, mostly - bodies of the men in the alley. Something like recognition flickers in her eyes and is gone as quickly as it appears. She regards him warily, and Erik knows from experience that even the slightest moment of recognition from a witness is dangerous, and he narrows his eyes in challenge.  

 The young woman turns her head for a moment, and the now meager fire in the dumpster goes out. 

They stare at each other. 

"Don't be afraid," Erik eventually says, as the girl pushes herself up and stands on unsteady feet, her eyes raking over the armor he's still wearing. She's a mutant, and he's just got his armor on. Armor that's meant for bullets, not whatever she can do. Armor, and no helmet, he realizes. 

He'd left it on the White House lawn.  

"I…thank you." she settles on, taking a couple of unsure steps toward him. She wobbles slightly, and Erik becomes vaguely aware of the fact that she's still talking, but there's a sharp edge of relief to her voice now - "He told me we weren't the only ones that could _do things_ but I didn't believe him until-" she trails off as one of the men groans from where they lay on the concrete and her eyes snap to attention. Erik knows from her speech patterns that she isn't sure whether or not she should give more information as to who 'he' is, and Erik wonders how many more mutants there are just in Washington DC.

"You're hurt." she says, gesturing to the two holes blown in the side of Erik's neck. He moves a hand to cover the wound, but stops as he feels something that he's never felt before come over him. There's a red haze around his neck and fingers, but it's not threatening. 

The corners the girl's mouth purse in concentration as the holes in his neck begin to seal themselves up, skin knitting together without needle and thread. Smoother than needle and thread. Erik rolls his shoulders as the wounds heal to find that the blood that had seeped from his neck is no longer sticky and drying in his clothes. It's not there at all, in fact, and the kinks in his clothes are ironed and smooth. Like he was never shot in the first place. For a split second, the world feels like it's been ripped apart and put back together upside down before righting itself again, put back together just slightly different than it ever was before. 

"Who are you?" she asks, her hand reaching out as if to touch his newly healed neck but falling to the side, as if she can sense the power and anger that thrums under his skin. 

"Call me Magneto." 

 She blinks several times. Recognition.

" _Oh_." 

"What's your name?" he asks, watching as she bends to gather up the remnants of her right shoe, staring at it like she can will it back to being whole. She probably could. 

 

"Wanda." 


	2. chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> things start to happen finally! don't worry about little sister!Lorna, I have more of this written and it's not what y'all think that explains her existence. ;)  
> (the bookstore Wanda is mentioned as working at in this chapter is actually a real place, but it didn't open until the mid-seventies, so minor anachronism there! if you're familiar with the area you might guess what it is. it's my favorite hangout in dc, actually.)
> 
> come hang out with me on [tumblr](http://mindtheglass.tumblr.com)! ♥

 

Charles sighs. It's half in relief and half in worry, as he listens to the steady thrum of noise in the house caused by the three boys. Hank is smiling and, for the first time in a while, it actually reaches his eyes. He’s filling in Alex (and by extension Evan) in on some of the lighter things that had happened in the years he's been gone. He gets to the part of the story that involved the “silver haired punk,” Hank snorts, that they'd picked up to break into the Pentagon. Alex laughs at this, and Hank knocks him with his shoulder. "He reminded me of you,” Hank says, “just…more idiotic." 

Evan laughs and leans back on the banister. "I'm not sure if that's a compliment or not, man!" 

“Yeah, well, I don’t think bozo here is in any state to critique idiocy.” Alex retorts as Evan laughs even harder.

“Big words, Alex, big words.” Hank claps twice in mock congratulations and Alex sputters a little.

They’re sprawled out the floor in the foyer, standard issue army bags in a small heap by the front door. The sun has long set and it’s the middle of the night.

Charles yawns, and three pairs of eyes snap to him.

“Think we should turn in now, yeah?” Charles had somehow managed to fall asleep for a moment on the plane and had showered since they’d gotten back from DC, as covered as he was in dust and rubble and blood, but is still tired down to his bones, and the bandages across one of his temples stings.

“You guys go ahead,” Hank says, waving them all off. “I work better at night, anyway.”

There is a sudden burst of uncertainty from the other two.

“Alex,” Charles says, as he unlocks his chair, turning around. “Your old room will do just fine.”

He blinks at that, like he can’t believe it’s still here. “And Evan, dear boy, you can take the one next door. It,“ _used to belong to Sean,_ Charles almost says, but doesn’t. Alex and Hank know that fact well enough. Both of them exhale when his sentence trails off, words unspoken.

“Yeah, thanks. I’ll show ‘im upstairs.” Alex nods, moving to scoop up his few belongings and motioning for Evan to follow him, and he does, falling in behind him like they’ve done this a million times. There’s a little bit of relief in routine, Charles knows, but he also knows that Alex is nervous too, as he watches the boy  - man, now - trudge up the final stairs to the wing where all of the children's bedrooms once were. It's not the typical, teenage nerves Charles had remembered filling the house long ago, but rather the nerves of someone who isn't sure if they're going to be able to sleep.

 He knows those. 

The door to the room shuts, and Charles listens in, just to make sure he's okay. He can feel Alex's quiet intake of breath as he takes in the dust on the windowsill, the musty blankets, and the - very few, water stained, and crumpled - photos in frames still on the dresser. One of all of them together, before the beach, sprawled out on couches in the study. One of Alex and his brother as children, the older Summers no older than ten, in shorts and t-shirts. One of Darwin, his head bent over the pinball machine in the rec room at the Langley CIA base, the line of his neck exposed to the camera.

Nothing in here has been touched since he left, the room sealed off and left alone as a reminder of what the mansion should have been. And of course, because of the fact that there was always hope that Alex, the most stubborn and the most loyal of them, would come back. 

Alex places his few things down gingerly, as there’s really nothing important in those bags anymore, and sits on the twin bed. His arms run over the army fatigues he's still wearing. He doesn’t have to wear them anymore and it's...nerve-wracking to take them off. 

Charles rubs a hand over his face, taking his mind off just Alex for a moment. They'd placed Evan, who Charles had managed to gleam some images of Raven in Vietnam from in the room next door in order for Alex to have at least something familiar around him.

Raven's rescue had still been fluttering around in the top of Evan's mind, probably caused by the shock factor of not being alone and that there are people outside of the military who can do what they do. _Spyke_ \- as the other boys had called him- had thought that the mutations were some new form of warfare, but his nerves seem calmer now that he's surrounded by a couple of, well, he thinks the phrase ' _soft academics_ ' with no malice behind it. Charles hopes the familiarity of the two being close is enough to get them through the next few days, until they begin adjust to being back in the house, not having to move around.

Charles can feel the cold ice that washes through Alex when he tries to lay down to sleep and has a moment of panic when he can't get comfortable. The bed is too soft, the room too _nice._  

 _Is it all going to be okay?_ Charles hears, not directed at anyone or anything specifically, and he comes out of his mental surveillance like one getting out of a pool after a marathon swim and feeling the shock of cold air on bare skin. His hands grip the armrests of his chair tightly. 

Charles isn't sure either he is going to be okay, either. He'd spent final flight to DC with shaking hands, feeling Hank's almost-paternal _concernwarmareyouokay?_ and he didn't need to read the concern behind Logan's _worried raised eyebrow_ expression, despite the shielding of his thoughts. He’d steeled himself then, knowing what he had to do to keep everyone else safe. Charles had seen enough of the desolate future, but Logan's words still ring in his head. The good parts. What they're - what he's - going to become. What the school will be. What it will mean. 

 _Scott. Jean. Ororo._  

He'd have to talk to Alex tomorrow. He'd known about the younger Summers brother, but didn't know for sure he was a mutant until he'd seen the images in Logan's mind on the plane. Having Scott back wouldn't make Alex's adjustment any quicker or smoother, but it was hope.

Hope for a future. 

There are so many things that could destroy them, other than the Sentinels or some men sitting in a political office. Granted, those were the ones causing the issues now, yes, but Charles knows that one day the fate of their race - of races mutant and human alike - would lie with the direct actions of mutants themselves. Hank is downstairs making tweaks to Cerebro, they could hire someone to clean the house. Charles already had Hank gather all of the alcohol in the mansion and put it down the drain and had the rest of the spinal serum destroyed - and they could get past this. They could. 

They could, no, they are, going to open the school again. Get new staff. Hire teachers. Train for self-defense. To protect. 

 Just in case. 

Still, his hands are shaking, and maybe going cold turkey is not the best idea that he’s ever had - and that makes him think of his mother so he shuts that train of thought down - but it is time to start over. Charles takes a deep breath and hopes he's right. 

Hank is waiting for him at the end of the hall and it strikes Charles that he’d probably been listening in on Alex for longer than he intended to. Stacks of papers are under Hank’s arm, a stack that would be too heavy to lift if not for his – not so visible right now - mutation, and his lab coat is back on his shoulders. "I repaired all of the damage that happened to Cerebro when you over extended-" he makes a waving gesture with his hands, "though it was all superficial in the first place. I thought it would be easier to use without broken glass everywhere, nonetheless." 

"Thank you, Hank." Charles says, watching as the young man shifts on his feet. 

"What do we do now?" he asks eventually, adjusting his glasses with one hand.  

Charles thinks of the helmet that sits inside of his hastily packed overnight bag in his - now first floor - bedroom. It’s old, covered in ten years of dust and grime, much like Cerebro had been before the fateful trip with Logan. He’d taken the helmet from the White House lawn, ignoring Hank’s curious eyes and the hard set line of his mouth. It’s another pawn in this new chess game, and Charles blinks as he pictures the now tarnished façade, remembering how bright and shining the metal used to be, had been, that day in Cuba, the reflection of his broken body in the sand reflected in multiple across its blinding surface, like watching the moment over and over on a movie screen.

The deep burgundy paint job is an improvement, at the very least, Charles thinks.

He shakes his head.

Tomorrow, they would find Scott Summers. One step at a time.

"The real question, Hank," Charles sighs, "is where do we start?" 

 

* * *

  

Peter jumps away from the television - still playing the late night news in the basement - by the click of dainty shoes on the front step. Wanda's been gone all day, as unlike him, as she has a steady job at a quiet bookstore in Dupont Circle. Normally, though, she's back before dark, back before the street lamps came to life. Their mother had gotten called back into work, as government work tended to want you back if there was a crisis, and their little sister was fitfully sleeping in her room, where she'd been sent after the news footage started airing. 

He doesn't wait for the figure on the front step to knock and he swings the door open and "Wanda, holyshitwhathappenedtoyourclothes _Wanda_ ohmygodwhathappened." Her clothes are dirty and torn, long auburn hair floating in tangled mats around her shoulders, and one of her shoes is broken, her powers only doing so much to hold it together. 

She blinks tiredly, but smiles a little, relaxing at the sight of her brother. 

"It's…a long story." 

"Oh my god, did you get jumped? Holy shit, I hope you kicked their asses." 

At her lack of response, "You did! Are you okay?" 

"Yeah…I mean, I guess." She takes off her shoes and tosses them in the wastebasket by the front door, glaring at them as they're a lost cause and she'd saved up enough for a new pair, anyway.

Her voice is quiet when she speaks. "I left late because we had some new books come in today and I had to spend most of the day in the stockroom, doing inventory. And on the way home there were these men, and…they shouted at me. And when I told them to leave me alone I might have," she gestures vaguely to the air around her, "on accident. Which…they didn't take too kindly to."

Her voice trails off and Peter can figure out the rest. "Yeah, okay." he says, because Wanda's powers are…more unbelievable and un-human than his are, if he's honest with himself, because he'd used his to win every track and field competition in the tri-state area and pickpocket and steal - which is almost normal. If he ran slower, it might just be chalked up to some really good genetics, and very few people actually believe that he runs as fast as he does anyway.  

Wanda moves to sit in the living room, on their dusty brown secondhand couch, and he follows her, getting there before she does. She scrubs a hand down her face. “They won’t bother anyone again.”

"It's okay, you're home. You did good. They're probably so terrified now, man." Peter says, nudging her shoulder. 

"Not of me, probably," she replies. "I wasn't the one that knocked them all out, Pete, that's the thing." 

Peter's eyes snap to her face and he's now sitting on the side of the couch closer to her, his weight balanced on the armrest that she's resting her scraped up hands on. 

"That guy, the one that you broke out of prison. That could move metal."  

"Shit." Peter exhales, and pops back into the basement to glance at the television. The news has moved on moved on to a different story, for the moment, but he flicks it off before returning to Wanda. He knows (from a brief meeting where he'd mouthed off, satisfyingly) that Erik, Magneto, whatever the heck his name is, wouldn't have been the type to tell her what happened and why he was stumbling through DC in the first place, and he knows that Wanda, sweet as she is and wanting to believe the best in people, especially a man who saved her life, wouldn't have asked. She would have told Peter about it now, if she knew, because he was never the type to watch the news in the first place - but if she'd been trapped in the stockroom at work she might not have heard what had happened.

Wanda likes her work but she doesn't have very many friends, Peter knows, even though she has the kind, gentle disposition of their mother. The shouts of _freak!_ that she hears, like echoes in nightmares from their childhood, don’t help, and even though she tries her hardest not to use her abilities in public, people always seem to know there’s something not-quite-right about her. It's like how animals flee before a storm, knowing something is coming.

 Wanda nods, scooting over closer to her brother. He's gone and back again, a first aid kit now lying out in front of him. He carefully pours some peroxide onto a cotton ball he swipes from the bathroom and holds his hand out for Wanda to slide her smaller hands over his. He concentrates, and his world slows down a little from its normal high speed so he can focus on his sister. He's always been a bit too fast for her. 

"He saved me," she says. "And he was hurt, so I healed him." 

"Well, yeah, he better have, considering I saved him first." His chest puffs out a little in pride, but it's mostly for show, a distraction while he sponges Wanda's scraped hands with the antiseptic. She winces a little, but between her strange powers and his own that give him a tendency to get into scrapes, this is a practiced routine. Sometimes, Wanda fixes bruised knees and ripped clothes before their mother sees and worries like she does, but sometimes, they just need to make each other feel better. 

"Where is everyone?" she asks, blinking in the darkness of the house. 

"Mom got called into work, an' Lorna's sleeping." 

Their little sister, still in her phase of princess dresses and fairy tales.

Wanda smiles at the mention of her, but Peter can't help but think of the box sitting next to the sink in the bathroom the girls share - the box of brown hair dye that keeps Lorna's hair from its natural bright green. Their mother had wanted the little girl to keep it green as long as she could, but the other children in her elementary school had started taking scissors to it and she'd wound up with gum in the ends and marker in her scalp on more than one occasion. On her last day with the green, her skinny body had been wracked with shaking sobs as she’d launched herself the school bus and into the house to escape the laughter of the other children. 

"Something happened today, Wanda." Peter says. "There's a reason you had to heal him in the first place." 

He tells her, about the plan the government had to _deal_ with them all, the sentinels back-firing, the floating stadium, the guns plucked from the hands of the US government, the dramatic speech, the way mom had dropped the glass she'd been holding, and the way Lorna had sat heavy in his lap, eyes fixed on the man speaking on the television. Even with the helmet, it was obvious who it was, and Peter could still remember most of his words. 

"He could have gotten caught, stopping to help me," Wanda eventually says, "couldn't he?" 

Peter snorts. 

"I have a feeling nobody catches him unless he wants them to," he says, standing and rocking on his heels. "We've got that in common." 

Wanda looks pensive, and Peter adds, "And he saved you. I don't want to think about what could have-" 

"He wanted me to join him," Wanda cuts him off, pushing the thoughts out of his head for the moment, "And I told him I'd think about it and I had to talk to my...family first." She looks meaningfully over at Peter, and he bites his lip. 

They have a _good_ life, a mother who tries her hardest to love them despite everything and a tiny house and she'd finished high school and he'd gotten his GED - but it could be so much better. It's not right that Wanda comes home with ripped clothes that she wears with a smile, and it's not right that Lorna's hair has to be dyed brown and that they feed her stories of princesses and castles to make her feel better. Peter thinks of the stress of his mother opening the door to juvie cop after juvie cop. _Yes, hello, is this the residence of one Pietro Maximoff? Yes, we'd like to speak to him regarding the matter of-_

That was his fault, granted, but part of it was because of the fact that it was just so damn hard for him to stay still. To act normal, to be human. 

"I don't want to kill anyone. I won’t kill anyone," she says, "but I think maybe…" 

He nods. "Maybe. Would be a lot more…fun, that's for sure." 

Wanda rolls her eyes at him and straightens. "It would be better for her, you know."  

Peter isn't sure if she means their mother or their sister. 

"I don't want Lorna, and mom, living in a world where those….things," she makes a gesture like a robotic arm aiming a gun, "exist. A world where people hate her because of how she was born and one where people want to-”

She wipes a hand across her face. “God knows Mom knows enough about that." Wanda looks down at her destroyed dress, covered in tears and ugly water stains. "What happens the next time they try? What happens if they succeed?" 

Peter sits on the floor in front of her, eyes serious. He’s normally not, prefers to laugh things off with snark, but he takes her hands and steels his voice. Deep breath. Slow.

“We stop them.”

 

* * *

 

Breakfast the next morning is a quiet affair, the four of them tucked around the kitchen nook, as the formal dining room is still covered in a thick layer off dust and eleven years of piled up paperwork and things no one thought to put away. It’s too big of a room for their small group, anyway, Charles reasons. They’d only used it when the mansion had its highest number of students, and those numbers had only lasted for several weeks.

They have toast, eggs, and coffee, and sit in companionable silence.

Alex has the faintest showing of bags under his eyes, and Evan drags his fork along his plate for several moments too long.

They’d have to properly stock the kitchen once smaller children are afoot again, Charles thinks, watching as the silence is broken when Hank misspeaks and Alex cracks a joke at him, the starkness of his dark under eyes easing a little with creases of laughter.

Hank has a pile of notes still on the table, as he’d only turned in for a couple of hours very early in the morning, Charles can tell, and he watches as Evan cranes his neck over to look at them.

“What are those?”

Readings from Cerebro are written across the pages, in Hank’s thin, analytical handwriting. The pages are faded now, from years of sitting stationary and being hidden away, but one can still make out the words. He’d added some, too, upon Charles’ latest visit to Cerebro, the black ink stark against the data that had faded to grey.

 _Locations, names, ages_.

“I’m sure Alex told you about the school, and, ah, how we found our students.”

Evan nods, “A little. It was very, you know, not _everything_ because we didn’t know who could hear...”

Charles bites his lip as Evan projects an image of Alex frozen into the backseat of the taxi by a black car.

“I see,” he says, eyes turning to Hank and making a mental note for him to check on that later. The government would be scrambling to capture Magneto now, and would probably forget about the two harmless men that had stood – well, one of them had stood, anyway – on the side of the stadium’s field. Raven, _Mystique,_ was a different story, and Charles didn’t yet know how the media would spin her presence in the Presidential bunker. They would find out soon enough.

Moira has been gone, memory wiped, for years, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t others. With the school reopening, they would have to work slowly, promote peace but also keep the students safe. Government surveillance might not be the _worst_ thing to ever happen to them, but he can see how the issue sends a chill down the boy’s spines. It leaves them vulnerable. 

“We’re going to reopen the school,” Charles announces, and the boys don’t react much as they all knew it was coming, “So that means that there are several more mutants I think we need to see,” Charles says, choosing his words carefully. This makes them blink in surprise, the fact that he is doing this so soon.

“You’re going recruiting again?” Alex curiously asks, “So soon after what happened?”

“We don’t yet know how the aftermath of everything will play out,” Charles says, “But right now the most prolific mutant of our kind is still a criminal, with his face on every TV. You know as well as I that it makes human parents of mutant children mistrustful.”

Alex nods, conceding the point.

“There is another matter, well it technically is the same matter, but more…personal."

 

"Alex, we seem to have found your brother.”

 

* * *

Erik isn’t surprised when mutants start to find him. Their kind has always been more resourceful than humans, more willing to do what they must to survive. He hadn’t advertised his location loudly, of course, that would be foolish, but he’d made it easy for the right kinds of mutants to follow his trail.

One of them, Mort-call-me-Toad-please, had appeared in a dirty chef’s apron with goggles strapped to his face. His visible, physical mutation probably made him a target, and Erik watches with a raised eyebrow as Toad shuts the door behind him with his tongue. Huh.

The second to appear, going by the name Ink, is quiet, and Erik knows from his stilted, unsure movements that he wasn’t born with the tattoos all over his body. He was made, Erik can see, and he later reveals that to be true, that another mutant had given him the power in his skin and made him one of them.

The safehouse isn’t so small that it can’t account for a small team, similar in size to what he had before. A few more should do, no more that they can’t keep tabs on each other. Not until they’re formally set up and working towards a goal. There are many places in the world where a man can work unseen, Erik knows.

A man calling himself Mastermind is the next to slink in, casting the room in the sharp colors and the bright sounds of a tropical jungle before sliding into a chair and saying nothing. Toad falls out of his chair in surprise as the room changes back, luscious palm trees and the buzz of humidity fading back to their normal dull grey and steel.

“Illusions.” Erik states more than asks, scratching at his chin.

 The man smirks, the corners of his mouth twisting up around his scraggly facial hair. “Useful, isn’t it?”

They spend the next couple days collecting an amalgamation of news reports, looking for the best actions to take. Mystique, mutant and proud, begins to be lauded in the human press as a hero, something Erik has to smirk at, as the girl – _woman, now_ – turned out to be not something of his own making, but of his and Charles’ combined.

It’s late in one afternoon, the same afternoon that sees a _New York Times_ cover story when his face on it, when the final two members of their brotherhood join.

The girl he’d saved in the alley in DC stands in the doorway, her face scrunched up as she looks at Toad, not sure what to make of him, and the fact that he’d undone the lock with his tongue. 

There's a hat from the Pentagon on her head, crooked and wind-blown. 

Erik knows right away that it's not the kind they sell in the gift shop.  

"Hello," Wanda says shyly, raising a hand in greeting and stepping inside the doorway. She’s suddenly not alone, and beside her, Peter inclines his head.

"Hey, you." 

Erik blinks in surprise, but regains his bearings, snapping his face back to attention. Wanda’s ramblings that night of a ‘ _him_ ’ make a lot more sense, now. This kid broke into his prison for no reason other than to do it, vibrating and breaking glass and taking out guards with nothing. He’d stopped guns before any of the adults had even moved to unleash their power, then took off and asked for nothing but to keep the hat as a prize. They’re wildcards, the two of them, powerful and valuable and perfect for his plans.

"Welcome to the Brotherhood." 

 


End file.
